Double Take

Let’s take a closer look at some of Pastor DeSilva’s statements to the executive committee.

Pastor DeSilva began by saying that Paul Borden had been invited by the business meeting to conduct an evaluation. Borden was invited, but that invitation was issued by the church board, not the business meeting (see the Epic, Pts. 1&2). The difference is one of level of authority. Pastor DeSilva was trying to give the impression that there was more power behind the invitation than there really was.

Before explaining his organizational chart Pastor DeSilva stated that charts are never 100% accurate. That may or may not be true, but it is largely irrelevant. Chart perfection might not be possible, but he could have come far closer to complete accuracy had he made the effort. He was hiding behind the statement to excuse poor performance. We also don’t entirely put it past him to have made the charts vague on purpose so that he could reinterpret them at will.

Pastor DeSilva also claimed that the new governance structure was “within the latitude” of the Church Manual. The thing about latitude is that it ends quite abruptly at the designated boundaries. If the posted speed limit for the road we are driving on is 55mph we are permitted to drive at exactly 55mph, or 32mph, or 47mph, etc. We have the latitude to drive at whatever speed we desire—so long as it does not exceed 55mph. This means that 60mph, or even 55.1mph, is not within the latitude. One of the many unfortunate things about this situation is that Pastor DeSilva and his supporters have used the fact that the Church Manual does indeed include some latitude to claim that everything is within the latitude. See our post, In His Own Eyes, for an examination of exactly what latitude the Manual does and does not allow. (Hint: the new governance structure exceeds the latitude granted by the Church Manual).

We have discussed this before (see To Keep It Holy), but Pastor DeSilva’s confused understanding of parliamentary procedure and how to conduct church business manifests again in his description of the process followed to vote the Borden Report. To start with, he describes a motion and a second taken during a town hall meeting (without a final vote). When the church is asked to make a decision of that sort it must be done in a business meeting, which must be announced ahead of time as such. (See p.89 of the Church Manual.) When Pastor DeSilva announced the meeting in advance he described it as a town hall, not a business meeting. If he wanted the church to act on business he should have announced it as a business meeting because that is the term that Adventist congregations understand to be associated with acting on business. Having failed to do that Pastor DeSilva had no right to seek action on any business in the meeting because he had failed to properly announce in advance that business would be acted on.

Further, Pastor DeSilva describes that during the town hall there was a motion and a second, but no vote. Under parliamentary rules, any motion that has not been voted on by the end of a meeting automatically dies. So, even if it had been a duly called business meeting the action taken would be meaningless because it was incomplete and therefore died at the end of the meeting. Finally, Pastor DeSilva described the procedure of having a motion and a second and a delayed vote as being a stipulation of the unvoted motion. Since that motion was not acted on that stipulation also had no force. To summarize, the correct way to do what he did would have been to announce the meeting in advance as a business meeting, make and vote on a separate motion to approve the irregular procedure he wished to follow for this matter only, and then make his motion about the Borden Report. If he had done that his delayed vote on the Borden Report would have been procedurally valid, but he didn’t and it wasn’t.

Pastor DeSilva claimed that Takoma Park had to vote on the Borden Report in its entirety because the report itself said to. Let’s take a quick look at the other things the Borden Report said to do which Pastor DeSilva ignored. First, he ignored all the dates. The report gives 11 separate deadlines for the accomplishment of the various “prescriptions” it makes. Absolutely none of these deadlines were met. The report also calls for a “mission audit” in which all ministries of the church are evaluated for their effectiveness and the ineffective ones are discarded. That never happened. The report also requires that, “The Senior Pastor and Vice-President of Pastoral Ministry will lead the congregation through an envisioning day. … Following that day the pastor and a few other leaders will draft a vision statement.” Long after the deadline for this had passed Pastor DeSilva announced his vision to the ministries board (see the Epic, Pt. 45), but the conference’s vice president for pastoral ministry took no part in the meeting, the congregation was not asked for input before the vision statement was written, and the pastor didn’t involve any other leaders in the preparation of the statement. Given that any similarity between the report’s prescription and what actually happened seems purely coincidental, we’re also putting this one in the “didn’t happen” column. The report says the senior pastor will get a “coach” to help him develop as a leader of a missional congregation. This didn’t happen. The report also says that the pastor and his new board will visit four other growing congregations. This didn’t happen. The report also says that the pastor, staff, and board will attend the Hit the Bullseye conference in Ohio in April 2008. This didn’t happen. So here’s our point: if Pastor DeSilva truly believed that the Borden Report was like the laws of the Persians and Medes in that it could not be changed he would have followed all of these other things to the letter as well. That didn’t happen. He overrode the decision of the business meeting to exclude the structure change from the vote on the Borden Report because he wanted to change the structure. Period. And he was out of line to exert executive authority of that sort which didn’t belong to him.

Finally, Pastor DeSilva claimed that the phrase “staff-led structure” had been misinterpreted to mean a congregational structure. We dispute that this constitutes a misinterpretation. We discussed staff-led structures in our Oct. 2008 post, How does the new structure work?

After the next chapter of the Epic regarding the questions of clarification asked by the executive committee we will be taking a break from the Epic for a new intensive series of posts examining Paul Borden’s book Hit the Bullseye in detail. As part of this series we will take a close look at the staff-led structure he advocates and see that not only is it congregational, but it is that very congregationality which makes it incompatible with Adventist congregations.